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Saturday, September 28, 2013

Have you Tried to Draw Like Picasso?

Picassohead is a lovely digital tool that allows users to create their own masterpieces using famous features drawn by Picasso. Teachers can use such an amazing website to unleash their students' creativity and bring the magic of arts into their classes.

Picassohead offers a digital canvas and supplies the user with facial features that almost look like they have been copy and pasted from Pablo Picasso’s paintings. The possibilities are endless as you can use color on, rotate, resize, and flip each feature. If you look past the apparent uses of each feature it is possible to create complex facial characteristics and express complex emotions (Self Portrait: Picassohead by Lorri Deavers, September 7, 2012). You can create and share your portraits following the steps below:

Teachers can create some portraits and use them as brainstorming activities.

Teachers can create some optical/visual illusions to use them as as ice-breaking activities.

Teachers can teach adjectives by creating some faces with different feelings (e.g., happy, sad, anxious ...etc.). Instead of translation, they can show their students these portraits to get the meaning.

Students can draw their portraits that depict some of their facial features and write a paragraph about themselves.

Students can pick up one of the most famous characters, draw them, and ask their peers to guess their names, jobs, achievements ... etc. Students can also practice grammatical structures, e.g., yes/no questions, wh-questions ... etc.

Students can create portraits expressing how they feel. Then, they ask their peers to tell them why they feel so.

Students can create a scene including faces and objects to start writing about the characters and setting of their story together.

After writing a descriptive paragraph about something, someone, or an object, teachers can ask students to read it and create a Picasso portrait that goes with the words.

Teachers can ask students to draw a face with profound and imaginative touches that is worth a thousand words. I mean pictures that can be felt and can't be described using words. Students can create an exhibition in their school or publish them digitally using Scoop.it.

Here are some portraits shared by some colleagues. If you want to add yours to the slideshow, please post your Picassohead link below in the comments box. Click the audio icon in the top left corner if you like to listen to music while watching the slideshow.

If you have any ideas of how to use Picassohead creatively in your classes, please feel free to write them below in the comments box. I love to create a list of your ideas mentioning your names.